Review: Burnout Paradise

I remember the days when arcade racing ruled the genre. Games like Top Gear and Penny Racers that sucked out all of my time as a child. However, since Gran Turismo was released companies have tended to shift towards making simulation racing games. The arcade style racing genre is pretty much dead outside of the arcade, but Burnout Paradise gives console-based arcade racers a defibrillator shot to the chest.

Burnout Paradise is basically what you've come to expect from the series, but on a much grander scale. All the blistering speed you've come to love about Burnout games (as well as the glorious crashes) is still intact. The main difference in Paradise is that you drive around a large-scale world and pull up to intersections to do races. While I initially thought that this was a bad idea, after playing for an extended period of time it seems like this was the right direction for this series to go. The way that this open world differs from the ones in Midnight Club or other games that have open-world racing is the fact that they place tons of objectives around the world that you can achieve while not racing or crashing. There are 400 shortcut gates that can be collected, 120 billboards to smash, and 50 super jumps to find and this adds about 10 hours of playtime to the experience.

Most of the events are still intact even though some of them are hidden under different names. Race, Burning Route, and Road Rage are still intact and are just what you would expect them to be. Burning Route has a new twist though, where each car has one burning route and if you complete it, you get a version of that car that has more boost power. New events include Stunt Run, where you need to go off jumps and smash things to accrue points and meet the goal, and Marked Man, where you need to get from point A to point B while 3 or 4 opponents try to take you down. Crash mode is in the game under the name "Showtime", but now you can activate it at any time by pressing RB and LB. You flip and twirl down the road smashing into cars and getting money for hitting cars, multipliers for hitting buses, and more money for distance moved total.

You progress in the game from having your learner's permit to earning your Burnout (or Burnout Elite if you want to do every event) License. You get upgrades by winning events, and every so often a new car is introduced in to the game world for you to chase, take down, and add to your collection. These chases can get very frustrating at times, but you feel a wonderful sense of satisfaction when you finally take them down. Also, the difficulty of the Road Rages, Stunt Runs, and Marked Mans slowly increase over time.

One thing that bothers me in the game is how in any event if you get hit by an enemy car and then touch a wall anytime within the next 10 seconds, your car erupts into a giant fireball. Also, Having DJ Atomica/Stryker mocking you every single time you fail an event (Which happens quite often. I'm looking at you Manhattan Burning Route) isn't all that fun. Another thing is that a lot of the races take you up into the mountains where the event selection is sparse and can easily be completed in the first few hours of the game, forcing you to drive all the way back to the city to start another event in the later stages of the game.

All in all, the game is a fantastic representation of what arcade racing should be. Midnight Club: LA is gonna have to kick some serious ass compared to it's what it has done in the past in order to beat this great game.

I give Burnout Paradise 4 & 1/2 out of 5 stars.